Former CIA Director John Brennan shot down President Donald Trump’s tweet from Friday that he was vindicated by a Republican-run Intelligence report that exonerated his campaign of colluding with the Russian government.
Brennan, a frequent critic of Trump, tweeted: ‘A highly partisan, incomplete, and deeply flawed report by a broken House Committee means nothing.
‘The Special Counsel’s work is being carried out by professional investigators – not political staffers.
‘SC’s findings will be comprehensive & authoritative. Stay tuned, Mr. Trump.’
Brennan was reacting to the president’s comments praising the report by the House Intelligence Committee.
Former CIA Director John Brennan (left) shot down President Donald Trump’s (right) tweet from Friday that he was vindicated by a Republican-run Intelligence report that exonerated his campaign of colluding with the Russian government
Brennan, a frequent critic of Trump, tweeted: ‘A highly partisan, incomplete, and deeply flawed report by a broken House Committee means nothing’
Brennan was reacting to the president’s comments praising the report by the House Intelligence Committee
‘Just Out: House Intelligence Committee Report released,’ Trump tweeted.
‘“No evidence” that the Trump Campaign “colluded, coordinated or conspired with Russia.”
‘Clinton Campaign paid for Opposition Research obtained from Russia- Wow! A total Witch Hunt! MUST END NOW!’
President Trump said Friday he was ‘honored’ by the new Republican-run House Intelligence Committee report that exonerated his campaign from colluding with Russia.
The president brought up the report during a photo-op with German Chancellor Angela Merkel hours after the heavily-redacted document was released. T
he report, running more than 250 pages, found his campaign didn’t collude with Russia – though it also found a Trump Tower meeting with Russians showed ‘poor judgement.’
‘We were honored. It was a great report – no collusion which I knew anyway, no coordination, no nothing,’ Trump said from the Oval Office.
Then, without naming it, he went after special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
‘It’s a witch hunt that’s all it is. There was no collusion with Russia. You can believe this one.’
Then, turning to Merkel, Trump said, ‘She probably can’t believe it. Who can?’
Trump lauded the report with what to him is the ultimate attribute: strength.
‘The report was very powerful, very strong, there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian people,’ he said with emphasis. ‘As I’ve said many times. I’ve always said there was no collusion. But I’ve also said there has been nobody tougher on Russia than me,’ Trump said.
Then he called it ‘totally conclusive’ – although a separate, significantly more bipartisan Senate investigation continues, as does the Mueller probe, which has already obtained guilty pleas from several Trump associates.
The bitterly divided Republican-run House Intelligence Committee released a redacted version of its final report on Russian ‘Active Measures’ Friday that exonerates the Trump campaign from ‘collusion’ with Russia.
President Trump said he was ‘honored’ by the House Intelligence panel’s report
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, April 22, 2018. The Intelligence Committee faulted the decision by top Trump advisors to meet with her
The report found ‘no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded, coordinated, or conspired with the Russian government,’ but it also found ‘poor judgement and ill-considered actions’ on the part of both the Trump and the Clinton campaigns.
The reports findings repeatedly highlight information to back up Trump campaign officials, while faulting the Obama administration and federal investigators for some of their actions.
It calls the Russian campaign to affect U.S. politics ‘nothing novel,’ and calls the U.S. government response to the Russian campaign ‘slow and inconsistent.’
The authors of the report also wrote that key Trump campaign advisors showed ‘poor judgment’ by attending a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer who admitted on Friday that she was reporting to Moscow.
Even in a document panned by Democrats, the GOP-panel gave a written slap to participants in the infamous June 2016 meeting.
The report found that the trio of top Trump advisors who attended the meeting – Donald Trump Jr., former campaign chair Paul Manafort, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner,’ showed ‘poor judgement’ by attending the meeting.
Donald Trump Jr. attended the meeting with a Russian lawyer who now says she sent information to Russia
They attended in order to meet a Russian ‘who falsely purported to have damaging information on the Clinton campaign,’ the panel states flatly – a conclusion that emerged from emails between the president’s eldest son and the son of a Russian oligarch.
The Kremlin-linked lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, acknowledged in a new interview with NBC that she was feeding information to Moscow, despite earlier denials.
“I am a lawyer, and I am an informant,” she told the network. “Since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general,” she said.
The Republican-run panel also pointed to contacts between the Trump camp and WikiLeaks – the transparency organization that the Intelligence Committee considers a hostile non-state actor countering the U.S. government.
‘The Committee also found the Trump campaign’s periodic praise for and communications with Wikileaks — a hostile foreign organization — to be highly objectionable and inconsistent with U.S. national security interests,’ the report said.
Even as it found ‘no evidence’ Trump associates stole Democratic Party emails or those belonging to her campaign chair during the campaign, it calls contacts with WikiLeaks, which published the emails, ‘ill-advised.’
The Republican-run House Intelligence Committee released a redacted version of its final report on Russian ‘Active Measures’ that exonerates the Trump campaign from having any ‘collusion’ with Russia
Veselnitskaya’s comments about feeding information to Moscow air tonight on ‘NBC Nightly News’ and on MSNBC’s ‘On Assignment.’
The report, which Trump called a ‘great honor’ and which found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, also traced efforts by the Trump Organization to open a Trump Tower Moscow.
Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, now under criminal investigation, exchanges repeated emails with an official whose name is redacted but has been reported in the past to be Russia-born Trump associate Felix Sater.
Touting the deal, he writes at one point: ‘Buddy, our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it.’
The deal fizzled out in 2016, Donald Trump Jr. testified.
But that wasn’t before Cohen ‘attempted to reach out to members of the Russian government’ to promote the project.
But he ‘apparently did not havea ny direct points of contact
He also writes that if ‘Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow … Donald owns the republican nomination,’ he writes.